1When all had gone over to this proposal, and the crowd had been cleared from the forum by the magistrates and the senators had gone off in different directions to calm the disturbances, then at last a letter arrived from the consul Gaius Terentius: the consul Lucius Aemilius and his army had been cut down; 2he himself was at Canusium, gathering the remnants of so great a disaster as if from a shipwreck; 2there were about ten thousand soldiers, disorganised and out of order; 2the Carthaginian was sitting at Cannae, haggling over the captives' —; 3ransoms and the other booty, neither in the spirit of a victor nor in the manner of a great general.
4Then private losses too were made known from house to house, and grief so filled the whole city that the annual rite of Ceres was suspended, because it is not lawful for mourners to perform it, and at that time there was not a single matron who had no share in grief. 5Therefore, so that other public or private rites should not also be neglected for the same reason, mourning was limited to thirty days by decree of the senate. 6But when the uproar in the city had been calmed and the senators recalled to the Curia, another letter came in addition from Sicily, from Titus Otacilius the propraetor, saying that the kingdom of Hiero was being ravaged by a Carthaginian fleet; 7when he wished to bring the king the help he begged for, he had been told that another fleet stood at the Aegates islands, ready and equipped, so that, as soon as the Carthaginians perceived that he had turned to protect the coast of Syracuse, they might at once attack Lilybaeum and the rest of the Roman province.
8A fleet was therefore needed, if they wished to protect their ally the king and Sicily.